Birmingham | >Re-PHOTO

Close Down Yarl’s Wood -2015

Close Down Yarl’s Wood: On Saturday 8th August I went with around a thousand protesters to Yarl’s Wood Immigration prison, in the middle of the countryside around 5 miles north of Bedford.

There were coaches from around the country but I travelled by train to Bedford, where organisers Movement of Justice had arranged for a bus to pick up epole from the station. The prison is on a wartime aerodrome at the top of a hill and a relatively remote location.

Even after the coaches had dropped us off at the front of the estate, there was then a walk of a little over a mile along the road and then along a public bridleway to the field sloping up from the 20 ft prison fence on the north side. There is a road for official visitors leading to the other side of the site.

I had missed an earlier protest which I had been invited to cover as I thought I was ill-equipped and other photographers would have more suitable gear than me. Most of my work is made with wide-angle lenses and to photograph though the mesh top half of the 20 foot fence the women at the windows inside was a challenge for me.

But this time I borrowed a 300mm Nikon lens from a friend and used it with my Nikon D700 in DX mode, which made it equioalvent to a 450mm lens, and it did a reasonable job, though ideally I would have had something even longer and faster. Most of the pictures taken with it are cropped.

Most of the pictures were made with a wideangle Nikon 16-35mm zoom, but a few with my usual longest lens, a Nikon 18-105mm, and even fewer with a Nikon fisheye. As well as the D700 I was also using a D810 at the event.

On My London Diary I list around 25 groups supporting the protest – and probably missed quite a few more. There is a very widespread feeling of disgust and shame at the way this country treats asylum seekers in a racist system that detains so many for long periods without trial, locking them away in detention centres such as these run for profit by private companies where they are always mistreated and often subjected to real abuse and sexual harassment.

Yarls Wood was then used to hold women asylum seekers, though there were also some families held there. When we arrived and they could hear the shouts and some could see us through the upper windows there “was a rapturous welcome from the women inside the prison, who came to the windows, shouting and waving and holding up signs. Protests like this really give the prisoners hope, and show them they have support and are not forgotten. Together, inside and out people chanted slogans ‘Shut Down Yarls Wood’, ‘Detention Centres, Shut them Down’ and more.”

The solid metal lower half of the 20 ft fence makes a loud noise when hit or kicked and the protesters made the most of this, with others writing slogans on them – though these were not visible to the women inside.

Although the detainees are prisoners they are treated differently to those in normal jails and have to be allowed some contact with the outside world to organise their cases – including mobile phones. They held up signs with their phone numbers so that we could see them – and then ring them up so that they could speak to the public address system the protesters had brought.

Many of those outside who spoke during the protest had spent some time in this or other detention prisons, and some were speaking to friends still inside. Detention is open-ended with people having no idea of when they would be released – or, if their applications failed, deported. One detainee was only released one day before having spent three years here.

There are many more pictures on My London Diary. Here’s how I ended my piece: “Too soon we had to leave. And they had to stay. As I walked away to catch the coach back to Bedford station I felt ashamed at the way that my country treats asylum seekers. They deserve support and humanity and get treated worse than criminals.”

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Rhubarb-Rhubarb 2007

Rhubarb-Rhubarb: In July 2007 I was a reviewer at the photography portfolio review festival Rhubarb-Rhubarb in Birmingham, then one of top four or five such events around the world.

The event, based on the first this type of event, FotoFest in Houston, Texas which had been founded in 1986, had begun in Birmingham as a portfolio day as a part of a ‘Seeing the Light‘ festival for photographers in 1997, named after photographer and educator Rhonda Wilson‘s 1993 book ‘Seeing The Light: The Photographers’ Guide to Enterprise‘.

Following the success of this review, Wilson went on in 1998 to organise the annual 3-day Rhubarb-Rhubarb International Festival in Birmingham which drew photographers from around the world to have their portfolios reviewed by a mixture of well-known photographers, educators, magazine editors, photography critics and others. And in 2007, me. And although I wasn’t going there to take photographs I did wear my Leica M8 with a 35mm f1.4 lens and couldn’t resist taking a few snaps.

The 2007 event attracted many mainly young photographers, including some who have gone on to be very successful in the photography world. I was invited to take part as a reviewer as for around seven years I had built up one of the largest and most followed photography sites on the web as ‘Photography Guide’ on one of the many micro-sites of About.com. On it I had tried hard to write about many well-known photographers and to write about photography in countries around the world.

Unfortunately although my work on About.com received many positive responses from photographers and collectors around the world – and some of my words were widely pirated on gallery sites and helped earn many students their degrees, the whole of About.com had recently been taken over by the New York Times, which saw it simply as a way to make a quick buck to finance their other activities. My micro-site had been a part of the fifth largest site on the web but a few years later the whole site had essentially disappeared.

Until then I had worked with great and supportive editors. My new editors didn’t like what I was doing. They didn’t want any serious writing about photography and had no interest in anything that was happening outside the USA. They wanted short easy pieces which would appeal to a wide American audience – taking pictures of your family, babies, Thanksgiving, July 4th etc – and more importantly to US advertisers. Readers in Australia, Bangladesh, Chile, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Honduras, India, Japan, Kenya, Lithuania, Mexico, Norway etc – and I had them in many other countries too – were of zero interest to them.

I fought with them for around seven months, making some small concessions but continuing to try to write – as I had been engaged to do in 1999 – for serious photographers, collectors and people with a real interest in the medium, while also providing some of the things the editors demanded. But by the time I arrived at Rhubarb-Rhubarb I was just out of a job.

I’d started Re>PHOTO a few months earlier, anticipating my sacking, largely as a site on which I could publish my thoughts on photography when I was no longer writing for money, though over the years it has slowly changed into being a site almost entirely about my own past work.

*Barry Lewis set up his white tent and photographed people*

Almost immediately I returned from Rhubarb-Rhubarb I posted a short piece on it, ‘Rhubarb Rhubarb: Three Canons‘, the title and structure referring to a short text with 3 pictures by Minor White. My ‘Three Canons for Reviewees’ based on my experience as a reviewer are perhaps worth repeating:

Three Canons for Reviewees

Be still, let your work speak and your reviewer think. Say only what is necessary.

When making your pictures think for yourself; when preparing to present your work, think of your audience.

Erase the word memory from your memory, your statements, your discourse. Let your work be memory, if so, then no one will need to be reminded.

*Curzon St Station, Birmingham’s first station for trains to London, viewed from the London train*

Rhubarb-Rhubarb in 2007 was held in the former Curzon Street station in Birmingham, a fine building which was Birmingham’s first railway station in 1838, but closed in 1966. It may open again around 2038 as the terminus of the ridiculously over-budget and emasculated to pointlessness HS2 line from Old Oak Common.

At the end of my 2007 >Re:PHOTO post I promised to write about some of the photographers whose work I reviewed – and I did. You can find more about them and Rhubarb-Rhubarb 2007 in August 2007 posts on >Re:PHOTO.

The last Rhubarb-Rhubarb was in 2009 and was the largest and most successful of them all, but the recession and the withdrawal of Arts Council funding put an end to them. Sadly Rhonda Wilson died in 2014 having been ill for several years.

You can read more about the 2007 event with many more of my pictures at Rhubarb-Rhubarb.

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Workers Memorial Day, HS2 Protest – 2014

Workers Memorial Day, HS2 Protest: Every year since 1989, April 28th has been International Workers’ Memorial Day, and on Monday 28th April 2014 I once more attended the event commemorating this at the statue of the Building Worker on Tower Hill in London, later going to Parliament Square where protesters called on MPs to vote against the HS2 Bill being debated in the House of Commons.

Workers Memorial Day

Tower Hill

One of the more hazardous industries in the UK is construction, and the annual Workers Memorial Day points this out. There had been over 50 deaths on construction sites in the previous year and the rally place around a coffin with boots, work gloves and hard hats.

Workers Memorial Day, HS2 Protest - 2014

A TUC report published for the day, ‘Toxic, Corrosive and Hazardous: The government’s record on health and safety‘ pointed out that since the coalition government came to power in 2010 it had “drastically cut Health and Safety Executive (HSE) inspections, cut funding to the HSE by 40 per cent, blocked new regulations and removed vital existing protections, prevented improved European regulation on health and safety, cut support for employers and health and safety reps, seen local authorities reduce their workplace inspections by 93 per cent, and made it much harder for workers to claim compensation if they are injured or made ill at work following employer negligence.”

The government was now planning to exempt many ‘self-employed workers’ from health and safety protection – despite them being twice as likely to be killed at work than other workers.

This attack on health and safety, carried out under the title of ‘reducing red tape’ also played an important role in providing the environment which allowed the disastrous fire at Grenfell Tower.

The theme for the 2014 events from the ITUC, the global union body coordinating the event worldwide, is ‘Protecting workers around the world through strong regulation, enforcement and union rights’ and it encouraged unions to use the slogan, ‘Unions make work safer’.

There were speeches including by Gail Cartmail, Assistant General Secretary of Unite, Tony O’Brien of the Construction Safety Campaign and Jerry Swain Regional Secretary for UCATT’s London and South East Region, after which wreaths and flowers were laid at the base of the statue by UCATT, Tower Hamlets Mayor Lutfur Rahman and Liliana Alexa who founded the Battersea Crane Disaster Action Group after her son Michael was killed by a falling crane as he walked past a building site near his Battersea home.

The event ended with the release of black balloons, for the 50 workers killed in the last year and a period of silence around the coffin with its boots, hard hat and work gloves and a hard hat for each one of them.

More pictures from Workers Memorial Day

Stop HS2 Rally at Parliament

Old Palace Yard, Westminster

HS2 is generally seen now as an expensive disaster, failing to achieve its aims and becoming something of a white elephant. It doesn’t go to where it was intended and will have to run rather slower than planned.

Despite the plans to run to Manchester and Leeds having been dropped the scheme has had a massive increase in costs. It still remains doubtful if it will ever actually reach its intended destination in London, Euston or simply serve its temporary terminus at Old Oak Common, six miles out in the middle of nowhere very much, where it will largely rely on a connection to the Elizabeth Line.

The project was almost certainly doomed from the start in 2009 under Labour, but its position was worsened by decisions by each successive government. There are various detailed studies of where it went wrong on-line, including by Graham Winch of the Productivity Institute.

The London to Birmingham section we may one day get was only a minor aspect of the original scheme and a part that offers relatively little gain – nobody really needs to get to Birmingham 20 minutes faster. Its route was poorly chosen and bound to result in the kind of local opposition that has greatly put up costs, and the whole project was severely over-specified – and in a way that makes it incompatible with the existing network.

Others, such as High Speed UK have developed much more coherent plans for the future UK rail network which governments have refused to consider seriously – and were one of those supporting and speaking at this protest. Their plans in 2014 would have avoided “damage to the Chilterns by following the M1 and would be 25% cheaper than HS2, while offering time savings on average of 40% for most intercity services – not just those on the high speed route.“

This was a relatively small demonstration with perhaps a couple of hundred people, but a colourful one, with a large inflatable white elephant and a couple of bears with a very large rail ticket about the £50 billion rip-off of HS2. There were speeches including from several MPs and campaigners.

More at Stop HS2 Rally at Parliament.

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Housing For Need Not Greed

Housing For Need Not Greed: Mostly my posts here look at old work, either from a few years ago or my work on London back in the 1980s and 90s. But I’m still goining out at taking pctures if not quite as often as I once did. So this post is about one of the two events I photographed last weekend.

Last Saturday, 8th July 2023 was National Housing Action Day, and a march from the Elephant to the Aylesbury Estate was one of 16 across the country on National Housing Day. Others were taking place in Lambeth, Islington, Kensington, Cardiff, Glasgow, Abbey Wood, Wandsworth, Harlow, Merton, Ealing, Cornwall, Folkestone, Devon, Birmingham, and Hastings.

Housing For Need Not Greed -Tanya Murat - Southwark Defend Council Housing — *Tanya Murat – Southwark Defend Council Housing*

The Southwark protest demanded Southwark Council stop demolishing council homes and refurbish and repopulate estates to house people and end the huge carbon footprint of demolish and rebuild. They demanded housing for need not corporate greed, refurbishment not demolition, filling of empty homes and an end to the leasehold system.

Housing For Need Not Greed — *Marchers at the Elephant on their way to the Aylesbury Estate*

Demolition and rebuilding of housing produces huge amounts of CO2, and whenever possible should be avoided now we are aware of the real dangers of global warming. Instead existing buildings should be insulated, retrofitted and refurbished and properly maintained.

Southwark Council’s estates have for well over 20 years been deliberately run down and demonised with some being demolished and replaced. Around 1000 council homes on the Aylesbury Estate have already been demolished buy around 1,700 are still occupied but currently scheduled for demolition.

*Marchers on Walworth Road on their way to the Aylesbury Estate*.

These homes were well built for the time to higher standards than their replacement and could easily and relatively cheaply be brought up to modern levels of services and insulation with at least another 50 years of life. The estate was carefully designed with open spaces, natural daylight and a range of properties, many with some private outdoor space. The planned replacements are at higher density, less spacious and unlikely to last as long – and only include a small proportion at social rents. Current tenants are more secure and the properties are far more affordable.

*People on the street watch and video the march*

Many of those whose homes have already been demolished here and on the neighbouring Heygate estate have been forced to move outside the area, some far from London as they can no longer afford to live here.

*Bubbles and Marchers on Walworth Road on their way to the Aylesbury Estate.*

Although the developers have profited greatly from their work with Southwark Council here and in other estates, and some officers and councillors involved have personally landed well-paying corporate jobs and enjoyed lavish corporate hospitality, the schemes have largely been financial disasters for the council and council tax payers.

Fight4Aylesbury was formed in 199 as Aylesbury Tenants and Residents First, and has been fighting Southwark Council’s plans to demolish the estate since then. While these schemes – part of New Labour’s regeneration initiative – have always been destructive of local communities and disastrous for many of those whose homes have been demolished, we now see that they are also environmentally unsupportable.

You can watch a video on YouTube of Aysen Dennis, Fight4Aylesbury and Tanya Murat, Southwark Defend Council Housing talking about the protest, and FIght4Aylesbury recently released a newsletter, The Future of the Aylesbury with more details on the estate and their proposals. A few more of my pictures from the event are in the album Housing For Need Not Greed – National Action Day, London, UK and are available for editorial use on Alamy.

Journey to Justice – Drop the Debt 2008

Sunday 18th May 2008, 15 years ago today, was an unusual day for me in two ways. Firstly that I went to Birmingham rather than London, but mainly that I went not primarily as a photographer, but as one of thousands of protesters, though that did not stop me taking photographs as you can see.

Recent developments in Artificial Intelligence are arousing considerable debate among photographers, partly about redundancy with AI generated imagery already replacing photographers in some areas of marketing and advertising work, but more importantly about authenticity now that you can generate seemingly photographic images of anything whether it actually happened or not.

Of course it has always been possible to make photographs which are misleading and dishonest, either at the point of exposure or later in the darkroom or more recently and trivially easy on a computer. There have been many historical examples and more recent controversies about faking or altering photographs, especially in some photojournalistic environments.

Of course in some areas of photography clearly anything goes. We don’t expect a work of art to be a literal interpretation, but when we come to news or photojournalism we expect things to be true to the event or occasion. And the only guarantee of that is the integrity of the reporter.

Of course as I wrote at the start of my piece on ‘Journey to Justice – Drop the Debt’, “You can’t take photographs without a point of view. Literally and metaphorically so – the rationale for making the picture determines the technical aspects of actually making the exposure. Where you stand isn’t just a matter of where you put your feet.”

I hope that my photographs make my position clear, as do the texts that I write to go with them, though on My London Diary and here I express my opinions as well as stating what appear to me to be the facts which accompany my images sent to the agencies I’ve worked with. I also don’t have to stick within the character limits they impose, typically limiting me to around a 100 words or less. Enough for the who, what, where and when but seldom much about the why, seldom enabling any real analysis of the events.

As my vintage website shows I’d been in Birmingham in May 1998 with some 70,000 others, forming a human chain around the centre of Birmingham, UK where the leaders of the eight richest nations in the G8 were holding a conference.

We were then part of a campaign by Jubilee 2000 to persuade the G8 countries to ‘break the chain of debt‘. Third-world countries were given massive loans in the 1970’s and are now crippled by the repayments, which now mean that a massive amount of money comes from the poor to the rich in repayments.

The noise we made back then made the world leaders come out from their conference room and listen, but then they went back inside and continued with business as usual. As I wrote in 2008, “Our actions in May 1998 had set the ball rolling, but as yet it has only gone one fifth of the way, and 80% of debts remain. All governments, including our own, have been guilty of making many promises that they have not kept on debt relief and aid.“

Things overall have changed little since then, although some countries in the global south have become rather more desperate and more vocal particularly as the effects of climate change increasingly hit them.

I wrote at some length about the day and the protest on My London Diary in 2008 and I won’t repeat that here, but hope some at least will click the link to read it.

At the end of that piece I wrote about the problem for those who didn’t have a long ladder in photographing what was an attempt to form and photograph the world’s largest human pie chart. I can’t find the official photograph on the web and I think it may have been little if any better than mine.

2008 Journey to Justice – Drop the Debt
1998 Jubilee 2000 – Birmingham